BlueHost hosting review

BlueHost is one of the most well-known hosts when it comes to hosting a website. We’ll have a look at why they are such a popular choice and how they stack up against the competition.

Quick Overview

Bluehost has become the largest brand name when it comes to WordPress hosting. They are officially recommended by WordPress and have been hosting websites since 1996. They offer a variety of different hosting plans from small shared-server hosting plans, to expensive dedicated hosting packages. For the sake of comparison between other hosts, we will focus on their affordable hosting plans and their dedicated WordPress Hosting plans.

Some key features:

Many different hosting plans to fit any budget & need

Daily Backups – (Although only with their more expensive plans)

Endorsed by WordPress

Free SSL Certificate – (Again only with their more expensive plans)

30-Day Money-back Guarantee

Well-known host that is used by millions!

Don’t go for their cheap shared hosting plans!

BlueHost offer Shared Hosting plans and these are massively popular due to the low prices ($3-6/per month), but let’s quickly run through why we wouldn’t recommend them.

First of all, NONE of their shared plans include an SSL certificate for your blog. An SSL certificate is what tells your browser that the website you are visiting is “safe”. It’s often shown with a green lock next the the website address.

So why is this important? Well, it’s of course always good to show your visitors that your site is safe and secure, but most importantly: When your blog is already on WordPress.com, it uses their SSL certificate, if you then choose a host without SSL – your readers will suddenly get a big warning that the website they are trying to view isn’t any longer secure.

Hosting with SSL included starts from $19,95/mo with their WordPress Hosting Plans. That is quite the difference, specially considering with another WordPress Recommended host like SiteGround, their plans are only $3,95/mo including free SSL. (Read our SiteGround review by clicking here)

Going back to other points why we won’t recommend their shared hosting plans is e-mail storage and back-ups. For their cheapest plan they only offer 100MB of storage per e-mail account, so if you want a custom e-mail like name@yourdomain.com, you will almost immediately run out of diskspace. For comparison, a free Gmail account gives you 15.000 MB of storage!

For unlimited storage you would need their Plus plan, but then again that doesn’t include backups and to have that included you’re suddenly looking at their most expensive plan at $5,95/mo (which will renew at $14,99/mo!)

BlueHost WordPress optimized plans

If you’re looking for a BlueHost hosting plan that includes an SSL certificate, daily backups and is tailored for WordPress, then you need to look at their WordPress Hosting plans. Unfortunately the prices for these plans start at $19,95/per month for the cheapest one. After the introduction offer runs out, the plan jumps to $39,99 per month!

While I am sure that these plans have excellent performance and service, the price is just way too much, unless of course you have no issue paying $400+ per year for hosting. If you’re looking to pay that much for hosting, and want impeccable performance, then we can highly recommend WPEngine.com as an alternative.

Alternatives to BlueHost?

Let us just be clear, we’re not bashing on BlueHost because we’ve had a bad experience with them or anything like that, in fact – if you sign up with them through us, we earn a commission from them. If you want to use them as your host, then I’m sure they will be excellent!

However, in terms of value for your money, there are just simply better alternatives out there. We would much rather recommend a different (but also officially WordPress recommended) host such as SiteGround. Below we’ve compared the cheapest plans both of them offer against eachother.

Webhost:

BlueHost

SiteGround

Cheapest Plan:

$3.95

$3.95

SSL Included:

No

Yes

Daily Backups:

No

Yes

Performance:

Standard

Faster!

Webspace:

50GB

10GB

Server locations:

1

5

To be 100% fair, we’ve included the only feature where BlueHost wins, which is Website Space. Here they win with 50GB vs. 10GB. So.. Is 10GB enough? Well for 99% of people it will be for a long time, and you can always upgrade for more space.

In our time of having worked with literally thousands of bloggers, we’ve only come across less than a handful of people that had used up more than 10GB with mediafiles. They however also had 700+ Blog posts and used uncompressed photos, imported directly from their DSLR-cameras.

Please note that we have commercial relationships with the above mentioned hosts, but that it does not effect our opinions. Our review is solely based on facts and experience. Using our links will not cost you anything extra, in fact you get a special discount you wouldn’t get otherwise!